Desktop integration

> Isn't the point of Unix environments the ability to use text-files to make sure things work? Sure if you want it to. > Then why doesn't Gnome use /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf It can if you want it to. Network-manager is kinda of a 'plumbing' feature of Linux and is going to be one of those things that is under the level of your desktop. Like if your running Postfix or Upstart or other service. Really all that Gnome itself provides is a systray that nm-applet runs in. So I think that whether or not Gnome uses network-manager is more of a distribution configuration item then otherwise. The nice thing about nm-applet is that it gives you a way to connect to various networks and autoconfigure stuff without requiring root permissions or running a entire GUI application with root permissions (which is just asking for security problems). Everything is handled through dbus (which is much simplier to secure then the entire X+GUI application stack) and this is a very significant advantage in terms of usability and security. But there isn't anything stopping you from dealing with wpa_supplicant manually. It's what Network-manager uses anyways so it should be pre-installed. On a correctly designed distribution Network-manager will automatically ignore any interfaces you configure manually. This is the way it is with Debian at least. > Another benefit: iptables can be started before the GUI kicks in and secure the machine from the start. If your not connected to the network without the nm-applet being active then what good is having a firewall before that? If your not connected to a network then your very secure. > Somebody told me that I can use fish:/ URLs to open remote files and I've duly noted down the syntax because I have no idea what this does, but it does open this file the webdude has told me I should edit with kolourpaint, and now I want to use GIMP because it's much nicer to use Well the lovely thing about GVFS is it's FUSE integration. When Gnome passes URLs to applications it'll typically use the GVFS related items to do it.. like fonts:// or sftp:// or whatever. However if your system has fuse support then it'll pass the file system path that links up with the Fuse portion of GVFS for non-Gnome-aware applications. So this way I could use Koffice to open up a document that is accessed through the SMB support in GVFS. > Update: It occurs to me that this is the kind of stuff we (distribution developers) should be concentrating on, by putting pressure on upstream and doing some of the work. I guess we've concentrated too much on “just” packaging the stuff. What your talking about is the point of FreeDesktop.org. XDG specifications and that sort of thing. They are going a long way to ironing out differences between desktop environments. The *.desktop stuff is due to Freedesktop.org and is why now we don't have to manually add applications to our start menus. (although the Debian menu system did it automatically for those lucky enough to use Debian). This way even when we install applications from source they can provide hooks for your menus. Another example would be xdg-open, which will open applications based on your defaults provided by your desktop or by your preferences in your ~/.local/share/applications/defaults.list This way applications can launch your favorite mp3 player when playing music, or launch your preferred web browser or email client without much fuss. Otherwise it used to be that any KDE application would automatically open up Konqueror. Gimp would open up Epiphany or Firefox or whatever. And everything else would be looking for /usr/bin/mozilla and fail miserably. Of course Debian alternatives provided similar functionality, but the freedesktop.org way is much easier to deal with IMO. --------------------- It would be very nice if somebody created a standard for locating a user-specific managed SQL database. This would be useful for all sorts of things besides just cutting down on the database noise.. Such as: * making it easier to sync applications. * making it easier to backup preferences * provide a central database for ODBC connectors and whatnot for users.. such as OpenOffice.org database backend.. you can import spreadsheet data into the database, or import financial data from your online bank into the database for use with different applications.